Analyses of God beliefs, atheism, religion, faith, miracles, evidence for religious claims, evil and God, arguments for and against God, atheism, agnosticism, the role of religion in society, and related issues.

Sunday, September 7, 2008

Despite the fact that the claim has been dealt with thoroughly by countless authors, the idea that there can be no morality without God keeps popping up, like some tired rubber ducky. It’s like the urban myth that we only use 10% of our brains. Everyone has heard it, everyone repeats it, it doesn’t make any sense at all, it has no empirical support, but it just won’t go away.

So here’s a quick way to characterize the hopeless mess that the claim, “There can be no morality without God” gets you into.

Ambiguities abound here. First we need to separate the ontological claim from the epistemological one. The ontological claim suggested by the tired platitude is that unless God creates or establishes it, morality would not exist in the natural world. Morality does exists in the natural world. Therefore, God created it. Therefore, God exists.

But there are serious problems with both premises. Consider the second claim that morality exists in the natural world: What is the source of ones belief that morality exists? A gut instinct, moral intuition, reasoning, some external source?

If it is a gut instinct or intuition, the problem is that it seems possible to be able to have gut instincts that are unreliable or inauthentic. That is, one could have a powerful intuition that morality is real, but be mistaken. Einstein had a gut instinct that quantum mechanics and indeterminacy was wrong. Newton had an intuition that lead could be turned to gold if he understood the principles of alchemy. If one is having a powerful gut instinct that something like morality is real, then how would one go about confirming or disconfirming that that instinct is a veridical one? Not the instinct itself, or another gut feeling. That’s circular. And that gives no one who doesn’t have the feelings any grounds to accept them. Futhermore, non-believers are desperately tired of having to explain and give details about how notoriously unreliable and dangerous gut instincts are.

So maybe it is reasoning. But if we can reason through to the conclusion that morality is real, if reason can open the window to it, then it would seem that the original claim that morality must come from God is mistaken.

If we can’t reason to it, then it’s not clear how one could have any grounds or reasons for thinking the claim is true. Why should we accept the claim that morality is real then?

Now consider the first premise. Suppose someone claims that the source of their knowledge that God is the source of morality is God himself, by way of the Bible or some religious documents. Now we’ve got a circularity problem again. Now we’re arguing that morality must have come from God because God says that it comes from God. First, how do we know what God says? The Bible and all the other religious documents we’ve been offerred are pretty poorly written, contradictory, patchworks of ideas. It’s certainly not obvious that they are to be trusted as always accurate. In fact, in lots of cases we know that they are mistaken about important historical details that we have investigated independently. Second, even if we think that the documents like the Bible accurately reflect what God said, what are our grounds for thinking that those claims are true? Those sources again? We know that what God says in the Bible is true because the Bible says that what God says there is true? Establishing that the record is accurate about what God said is one thing, establishing that those claims are also true is another matter. (Those two are frequently conflated.) If I want to check to see if a book actually contains the words that the author wrote, I might check with the author—but even that might not work if the author gets confused or has a bad memory. But we can’t do anything like that with the Bible. Checking with other copies of the Bible might establish at most that what one copy contains matches what another one contains. (When we have done this with the different copies of the Bible have been shockingly different.) And clearly it won’t do to simply point to the book itself to confirm that what the book says is true. Circular reasoning doesn’t give anyone grounds for accepting a conclusion.

Now let’s consider the epistemological claim reflected by “unless people believe in God, they won’t be moral.” By “epistemological” I mean that maybe people cannot know morality without God’s involvement in some way. But there’s another ambiguity here. Does the claim mean that people won’t behave in a way that outwardly appears to be decent and moral, or does it mean that even if appear to be behaving themselves, they really aren’t moral because of their failure to understand or think about morality and God in the right way? If the idea is that people who don’t believe in God won’t even appear to be decent, moral people by their actions, then obviously that is mistaken. There are and have been billions of people on the planet who do not believe in the classic monotheistic God of the Bible, Koran, or Torah, who have perfectly decent lives that, aside from some particulars, look just like the lives of Bible believing Christians, or Koran citing Muslims. It would be preposterous to suggest that billions of Buddhists, which by most accounts is an atheistic doctrine, don’t even act morally. It seems absurd even to suggest that on the whole their behaviors tend to be less apparently moral. But that would be an empirical question that could be readily settled, and it’s a question that the defender of the “No morality without God” claim most likely has not investigated.

So is the claim that even though all of those billions of people might look like they are decent people, but really, in their hearts they are wicked because they are not motivated by God or don’t have the right sort of ideas about their moral decisions? Again, this is preposterous. The problem defaults to the dilemma above. How does the believer come to have this knowledge about the proper source of ideas about morality? A gut instinct? Of course, a lot of those Buddhists and other non-believers have powerful gut instincts about what’s right and wrong too. What informs us that their moral intuitions are mistaken but the God believer’s are correct? Another intuition? That’s a painfully tight little circle the believer would have to defend. Is it reasoning? So we can determine with reasoning that unless people have the rightly Godly ideas about morality, they aren’t really moral—they only look like it? But now the believer has contradicted the original claim. This means that one’s source of knowledge about morality actually arises from reasoning, not God. Oh, reasoning ultimately comes from God you say? How do we determine that? With more reasoning (which would be self-refuting), or by appealing back to God (circular)? And notice that now we’ve left the question of morality, or traced it back to something else entirely, which means that morality isn’t really based on God directly, and the whole point of this was to prove that it is. So again, the believer’s claim that morality requires God falls apart.

As it turns out, the only method we have ever come upon that isn’t flagrantly circular or patently false for establishing that something is real is by forming hypotheses about it, making predictions, testing those predictions against empirical observations, repeating the testing, and then confirming or disconfirming them on the basis of carefully scrutinized, peer-reviewed argument and data. And that method has shown us that morality is an objective, real phenomena. We have found basic moral behaviors across all human cultures. We have found proto-moral behaviors in many animals. Stephen Pinker, Frans de Waal, Jonathan Haidt and many others have produced compelling research that shows that the analogs of all the basic human moral behaviors can be found in other animals and there are a number of theories about the evolutionary mechanisms that would have produced them. More importantly, these theories can be empirically investigated, they can make predictions, and they can be confirmed or disconfirmed without committing the mistakes that the God believer falls into here.

So in the end, the claim that without God there can be no morality is either hopelessly circular, or its patently false. And ironically, it’s science and evolution that show us that morality is objective and real, not religion.

18 comments:

Second, even if we think that the documents like the Bible accurately reflect what God said, what are our grounds for thinking that those claims are true? Those sources again? We know that what God says in the Bible is true because the Bible says that what God says there is true?

Actually, a plain reading of the Bible (Gen 2:17) tells us that God is a liar.

It is shocking how the no-morality-without-God argument is one of the preferred arguments peddled around by theists in the U.S. these days and yet it is such a horrible argument.

But I do have two comments/worries about some of your points:

(1) In discussing the second premise, you write that their arguments for it are typically at odds with the first premise. That seems right in many ways. However, you say:

"...if we can reason through to the conclusion that morality is real, if reason can open the window to it, then it would seem that the original claim that morality must come from God is mistaken."

I'm not sure this is right. Why can't the theist just say that morality is a divine sort of thing (so it has to have been created by a God) but reason is an epistemic route to knowledge of the nature of morality at least (not the correct first-order moral theory)? They would need some of argument for this, but it seems like your criticism alone can't block it.

It seems like you're thinking that the claim that God is the source of morality precludes the claim that we can know something about the nature of morality through reasoning. I guess I'm just not sure that that's right. Compare: Suppose a French citizen says "The content of the U.S. constitution depends on the activity of some humans, though I'm not one of them." This person just has the concept of the U.S. constitution and knows that its content depends on some people other than her, and she knows this by thinking clearly and reflectively about the concept she has of the U.S. constitution.

(2) You say toward the end that science is the "the only method we have ever come upon that isn’t flagrantly circular or patently false for establishing that something is real." This is a common theme in current atheism. However, I think there is a serious worry here about making the scientific method the only route to the truth or knowledge about what's real. Of course, I loves me some science. But I think it's clear that not everything is known through the methods of the natural sciences.

And I think this is a bad sort of assumption to make especially when debating with theists about morality. I worry that the theist is just going to win if we accept the burden of explaining the existence of objective moral facts through science. I think theists would likewise win the debate (just in the sense of having a more powerful or convincing argument) if we allowed them to saddle the atheist with the burden of explaining the existence of objective mathematical truths by empirical science. I just think there are plenty of ways to show that the no-morality-without-God argument is flawed without resulting to the claim that we only know stuff through science.

It think it shouldn't be that atheists have to hold that a truth is known only through science. And it likewise shouldn't be that theists have to hold that things are known through either science or religious intuition/revelation/hope/faith. We should, I think, all just be able to agree that we need reasons or justification for our beliefs. Science often provides that, but so do other methods. And mere faith, hope, etc. do not.

Just some thoughts. I'd be interested to see what you think. Thanks for the post!

"it’s science and evolution that show us that morality is objective and real". My reading of the scientific evidence is not that it provides an objective morality, but rather a subjective ones. Different moralities arise in different conditions and advantage different types of individuals.

I don't share your optimism with respect to science. It may be able to tell us how to act in order to achieve what we want, or what the probability is that certain actions will prevent the worst case scenario, but it will never be able to tell us what we should want. At some point it becomes more important to know who the scientists are working for.

Thanks to all who have commented. This seems to have gotten some people stirred up.

Josh, great comments. I always tell my students not to turn in their first drafts--I should heed my own advice. I think you're right about the science claim. I guess I'll say that science is the best method we have for determining what's real. And it's really just a side comment. Studies in biology and anthropology have been able to confirm the existence of analogs of human moral behavior in animals. Community, fairness, sympathy, and other rudiments of human moral systems are present in a number of "lower" animals.

On your first point. I put that wrong. Notice that I'm addressing this argument:

If the principles of morality can be revealed by reason, then the theist has got a problem in this argument. The argument alleges to show God's existence from the existence of morality. If an inquiry by reason produces the fundamental principles of morality (as Kant said it does), then the inexplicableness of morality can't be invoked to prove God any more. It won't do for the theist to say, "Well, God produces morality, reason is just our route to it. Therefore God exists." That's circular again. What we're trying to do is find some independent grounds for God's existence. They can't argue from the premise "God produces morality" to the conclusion "therefore God exists." Maybe that's a better way to put my point.

Anonymous, again, take a look at the work of Frans de Waal, Jonathan Haidt, and Stephen Pinker. I've cited them several times here.

Hey, MM. Thanks for clarifying. I take your point. However, I still think the theist might have some sort of response.

I'm imagining the theist distinguishing very strictly between morality and the concept of morality. Most of us have the concept of morality. Presumably, we need it to debate the issue at all. So can't the theist say the following?

"We've got this concept of morality. And if we think carefully about it, we notice that it is divine in a certain sense---namely, if there is something in the world that falls under the concept, then it must have a divine source."

Of course, after endorsing this sort of divine command theory, the theist has to claim that some things do fall under the concept---there are instances of morality or moral actions or whatever---to then claim that God exists. And this is what you contend she can't do since she will have to abandon divine command theory to show that morality exists. I take it that one way to summarize your point is: divine command theory is incompatible with a moral rationalism like Kant's. That seems right, unless one has a very implausible view of our rational faculty according to which our rational moral judgments always accord exactly with God's will.

But I'm imagining the theist as distinguishing also between the correct principles of morality and morality itself. I'm thinking that "morality itself" is something like a property, perhaps of actions. In this way, I think the theist doesn't have to endorse moral rationalism in order to support the second premise of the argument (the premise that morality does exists in the natural world). She can deny having any knowledge of the correct fundamental principles of morality by anything other than God's will; she simply holds that she does have some very general knowledge about the nature of this property of moral wrongness.

So, I guess I'm assuming that it's not implausible for the theist to hold divine command theory, deny moral rationalism, but still hold that morality exists (where I'm thinking of this as the claim that there are moral facts, properties, etc.). After all, we don't tend to think that we must have a correct first-order ethical theory in hand in order to make the general, meta-ethical claim that morality exists---that certain things are morally right or wrong, good or bad.

Now, I think there is plenty to object to in this theistic response. But I'm just trying to play devil's advocate (no pun intended) to see if one could get around your argument. Frankly, if you're right and I'm wrong, you've got a nice argument here---one that I'd love to endorse. :)

Thanks again Josh for reading so closely and thinking hard about this. A few comments:

first, you're right, there will be some theists somewhere who won't be convinced about this. You're not really doing this, but I often get comments from people who outline some new, convoluted position that my argument seems to have pushed the theist back to, and then they say, "Well, what do you say about that? huh? smarty pants?" I can only take on so much at one time, and I've opted for fast, loose, and provocative in these blog posts, not careful and bulletproof. (But that's no defense of my argument, of course.)

What about the divine command theorist who denies a rational theory of morality? Well, once someone has been pushed back to here, I think they've got a whole shit load of new troubles having to do with DCT, but not so much the argument I have given here. They'll need to deal with the Euthyphro dilemma, obviously. And a lot of what I have to say about Divine Command Theory I've written up in all the "Morality and Atheism posts over on the left side. As far as I can tell, divine command theory is just a non-starter. I think there are VERY few serious moral theorists, not just a hack like me, who take it seriously. And I always have this very simple point to make. Deciding to act according to one divine command instead of another is itself a moral choice that one has to make on your own. It really doesn't matter that some magical being in the sky commanded it--you've got to find some grounds other than that for deciding that it is the RIGHT thing to do. Believers do this on a regular basis when they opt to abide by some commandments but ignore others, like the ones about executing anyone who violates the 10 commandments. Thanks again.

* Heroism and the Duty to Rescue Show that there is No God * The Believer's Moral Double Standard for God * The New Ten Commandments * No Moral Truths, No God * Monkey Morality, or Goodness Isn’t Magical * Stephen Pinker: Instinct for Morality * Trying to be Moral Through the Distorted Lens of the Bible * Incoherent: I believe because it makes me moral. * Believing in God is Immoral * Does the Theist Have a Moral Advantage over the Atheist? * Can Atheists be Moral?

If the theist wants to claim that morality has a divine origin, I think it is incumbant on the theist to say just how this happens. How does God CREATE morality, and how can the theist maintain this thesis without running afoul of the Euthyphro problem? If the theist is pressed on this point, I think a better answer is called for than "well, I think that reason is a way we can know about the nature of divinely created morality, but at the same time I deny that the nature of morality is completely arbitrary in the way suggested by the Euthyphro problem". The theist can even say, "I don't know the details of the story that needs to be told to meake sense of things here, but I accept on faith that such a story can be told". But this admission weakens the claim that God MUST be posited as the source of (objective) morality so much as to render it impotent. It reduces to the mere assertion that God is necessary for morality, and provides no positive grounds undergirding such an assertion.

is that list in your last comment to other blog entries of yours? I've notice you also post entire URLs in your comments elsewhere. The problem is that they sometimes get cut off for not fitting on one line. You should use a little html in your comment (the "a" tag) to turn them into links, and with long URLs to just hyperlink some text. It makes it easier to navigate and connect your blog entries. I've also found just putting in a "further reading" kind of list of links at the bottom of an entry related to other topics does the job too; plus you can throw in off-site links in that list as well. Just some logistics stuff I thought I'd throw out there, from one blogger to another!

I just came across a really interesting website http://www.healingtheriftbook.com/ in which it was announced that a book concerning this very topic, science and spirituality,is going to be released in October. The book is titled, “Healing the Rift,” by Leo Kim.I was really encouraged when I read what this book entails. Apparently the author of this book has extensive experience working in cancer wards. He writes about his experiences and analyzes them on a scientific and spiritual level. This book just may help answer the question as to whether or not science and god do coexist. Definitely sounds interesting no matter what your beliefs are.

My book is out:

Search This Blog

Atheism

Author:

Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Rochester. Teaching at CSUS since 1996. My main area of research and publication now is atheism and philosophy of religion. I am also interested in philosophy of mind, epistemology, and rational decision theory/critical thinking.

Quotes:

"Science. It works, bitches."

"The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully." - Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion

"Religion easily has the greatest bullshit story ever told. Think about it. Religion has actually convinced people that there's an invisible man living in the sky who watches everything you do, every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a special list of ten things he does not want you to do. And if you do any of these ten things he has a special place, full of fire and smoke and burning and torture and anguish where he will send you to live and suffer and burn and choke and scream and cry for ever and ever until the end of time. But he loves you! He loves you and he needs money!"George Carlin 1937 - 2008

Many Paths, No God.

I don't go to church, I AM a church, for fuck's sake. I'm MINISTRY. --Al Jourgensen

Every sect, as far as reason will help them, make use of it gladly; and where it fails them, they cry out, “It is a matter of faith, and above reason.”- John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding

If life evolved, then there isn't anything left for God to do.

The universe is not fine-tuned for humanity. Humanity is fine-tuned to the universe. Victor Stenger

Skeptical theists choose to ride the trolley car of skepticism concerning the goods that God would know so as to undercut the evidential argument from evil. But once on that trolley car it may not be easy to prevent that skepticism from also undercutting any reasons they may suppose they have for thinking that God will provide them and the worshipful faithful with life everlasting in his presence. William Rowe

Unless you're one of those Easter-bunny vitalists who believes that personality results from some unquantifiable divine spark, there's really no alternative to the mechanistic view of human nature. Peter Watts

The essence of humanity's spiritual dilemma is that we evolved genetically to accept one truth and discovered another. E.O. Wilson

Creating humans who could understand the contrast between good and evil without subjecting them to eons of horrible suffering would be an utterly inconsequential matter for an omnipotent being. MM

The second commandment is "Thou shall not construct any graven images." Is this really the pinnacle of what we can achieve morally? The second most important moral principle for all the generations of humanity? It would be so easy to improve upon the 10 Commandments. How about "Try not to deep fry all of your food"? Sam Harris

Religion comes from the period of human prehistory where nobody--not even the mighty Democritus who concluded that all matter was made from atoms--had the smallest idea what was going on. It comes from the bawling and fearful infancy of our species, and is a babyish attempt to meet our inescapable demand for knowledge (as well as comfort, reassurance, and other infantile needs). Today the least educated of my children knows much more about the natural order than any of the founders of religion, and one would think--though the connection is not a fully demonstrable one--that this is why they seem so uninterested in sending fellow humans to hell.Christopher Hitchens, God is Not Great

We believe with certainty that an ethical life can be lived without religion. And we know for a fact that the corollary holds true--that religion has caused innumerable people not just to conduct themselves no better than others, but to award themselves permission to behave in ways that would make a brothel-keeper or an ethnic cleanser raise an eyebrow. Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great

If atheism is a religion, then not playing chess is a hobby.

"Imagine a world in which generations of human beings come to believe that certain films were made by God or that specific software was coded by him. Imagine a future in which millions of our descendants murder each other over rival interpretations of Star Wars or Windows 98. Could anything--anything--be more ridiculous? And yet, this would be no more ridiculous than the world we are living in." Sam Harris, The End of Faith, 36.

"Only a tiny fraction of corpsesfossilize, and we are lucky to have as many intermediate fossils as we do. We could easily have had no fossils at all, and still the evidence for evolution from other sources, such as molecular genetics and geographical distribution, would be overwhelmingly strong. On the other hand, evolution makes the strong prediction that if a single fossil turned up in the wrong geological stratum, the theory would be blown out of the water." Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, p. 127.

One cannot take, "believing in X gives me hope, makes me moral, or gives me comfort," to be a reason for believing X. It might make me moral if I believe that I will be shot the moment I do something immoral, but that doesn't make it possible for me to believe it, or to take its effects on me as reasons for thinking it is true. Matt McCormick

Add this blog to your Google Page

Top Ten Myths about Belief in God

1. Myth: Without God, life has no meaning.

There are 1.2 billion Chinese who have no predominant religion, and 1 billion people in India who are predominantly Hindu. And 65% of Japan's 127 million people claim to be non-believers. It is laughable to suggest that none of these billions of people are leading meaningful lives.

2. Myth: Prayer works.

Numerous studies have now shown that remote, blind, inter-cessionary prayer has no effect whatsoever of the health or well-being of subject's health, psychological states, or longevity. Furthermore, we have no evidence to support the view that people who wish fervently in their heads for things that they want get those things at any higher rate than people who do not.

3. Myth: Atheists are less decent, less moral, and overall worse people than believers.

There are hundreds of millions of non-believers on the planet living normal, decent, moral lives. They love their children, care about others, obey laws, and try to keep from doing harm to others just like everyone else. In fact, in predominately non-believing countries such as in northern Europe, measures of societal health such as life expectancy at birth, adult literacy, per capita income, education, homicide, suicide, gender equality, and political coercion are better than they are in believing societies.

4. Myth: Belief in God is compatible with the descriptions, explanations and products of science.

In the past, every supernatural or paranormal explanation of phenomena that humans believed turned out to be mistaken; science has always found a physical explanation that revealed that the supernatural view was a myth. Modern organisms evolved from lower life forms, they weren't created 6,000 years ago in the finished state. Fever is not caused by demon possession. Bad weather is not the wrath of angry gods. Miracle claims have turned out to be mistakes, frauds, or deceptions. So we have every reason to conclude that science will continue to undermine the superstitious worldview of religion.

5. Myth: We have immortal souls that survive the death of the body.

We have mountains of evidence that makes it clear that our consciousness, our beliefs, our desires, our thoughts all depend upon the proper functioning of our brains our nervous systems to exist. So when the brain dies, all of these things that we identify with the soul also cease to exist. Despite the fact that billions of people have lived and died on this planet, we do not have a single credible case of someone's soul, or consciousness, or personality continuing to exist despite the demise of their bodies. Allegations of spirit chandlers, psychics, ghost stories, and communications with the dead have all turned out to be frauds, deceptions, mistakes, and lies.

6. Myth: If there is no God, everything is permitted. Only belief in God makes people moral.

Consider the billions of people in China, India, and Japan above. If this claim was true, none of them would be decent moral people. So Ghandi, the Buddha, and Confucius, to name only a few were not moral people on this view, not to mention these other famous atheists: Abraham Lincoln, Albert Einstein, Aldous Huxley, Charles Darwin, Benjamin Franklin, Carl Sagan, Bertrand Russell, Elizabeth Cady-Stanton, John Stuart Mill, Galileo, George Bernard Shaw, Gloria Steinam, James Madison, John Adams, and so on.

7. Myth: Believing in God is never a root cause of significant evil.

The counter examples of cases where it was someone's belief in God that was the direct justification for their perpetrated horrendous evils on humankind are too numerous to mention.

8. Myth: The existence of God would explain the origins of the universe and humanity.

All of the questions that allegedly plague non-God attempts to explain our origins--why are we here, where are we going, what is the point of it all, why is the universe here--still apply to the faux explanation of God. The suggestion that God created everything does not make it any clearer to us where it all came from, how he created it, why he created it, where it isall going. In fact, it raises even more difficult mysteries: how did God, operating outside the confines of space, time, and natural law "create" or "build" a universe that has physical laws? We have no precedent and maybe no hope of answering or understanding such a possibility. What does it mean to say that some disembodied, spiritual being who knows everything and has all power, "loves" us, or has thoughts, or goals, or plans? How could such a being have any sort of personal relationship with beings like us?

9. Myth: Even if it isn't true, there's no harm in my believing in God anyway.

People's religious views inform their voting, how they raise their children, what they think is moral and immoral, what laws and legislation they pass, who they are friends and enemies with, what companies they invest in, where they donate to charities, who they approve and disapprove of, who they are willing to kill or tolerate, what crimes they are willing to commit, and which wars they are willing to fight. How could any reasonable person think that religious beliefs are insignificant.

10: Myth: There is a God.

Common Criticisms of Atheism (and Why They’re Mistaken)

1. You can’t prove atheism.You can never prove a negative, so atheism requires as much faith as religion.

Atheists are frequently accosted with this accusation, suggesting that in order for non-belief to be reasonable, it must be founded on deductively certain grounds. Many atheists within the deductive atheology tradition have presented just those sorts of arguments, but those arguments are often ignored. But more importantly, the critic has invoked a standard of justification that almost none of our beliefs meet. If we demand that beliefs are not justified unless we have deductive proof, then all of us will have to throw out the vast majority of things we currently believe—oxygen exists, the Earth orbits the Sun, viruses cause disease, the 2008 summer Olympics were in China, and so on. The believer has invoked one set of abnormally stringent standards for the atheist while helping himself to countless beliefs of his own that cannot satisfy those standards. Deductive certainty is not required to draw a reasonable conclusion that a claim is true.

As for requiring faith, is the objection that no matter what, all positions require faith?Would that imply that one is free to just adopt any view they like?Religiousness and non-belief are on the same footing?(they aren’t).If so, then the believer can hardly criticize the non-believer for not believing. Is the objection that one should never believe anything on the basis of faith?Faith is a bad thing?That would be a surprising position for the believer to take, and, ironically, the atheist is in complete agreement.

2. The evidence shows that we should believe.

If in fact there is sufficient evidence to indicate that God exists, then a reasonable person should believe it. Surprisingly, very few people pursue this line as a criticism of atheism. But recently, modern versions of the design and cosmological arguments have been presented by believers that require serious consideration. Many atheists cite a range of reasons why they do not believe that these arguments are successful. If an atheist has reflected carefully on the best evidence presented for God’s existence and finds that evidence insufficient, then it’s implausible to fault them for irrationality, epistemic irresponsibility, or for being obviously mistaken.Given that atheists are so widely criticized, and that religious belief is so common and encouraged uncritically, the chances are good that any given atheist has reflected more carefully about the evidence.

3. You should have faith.

Appeals to faith also should not be construed as having prescriptive force the way appeals to evidence or arguments do. The general view is that when a person grasps that an argument is sound, that imposes an epistemic obligation of sorts on her to accept the conclusion. One person’s faith that God exists does not have this sort of inter-subjective implication. Failing to believe what is clearly supported by the evidence is ordinarily irrational. Failure to have faith that some claim is true is not similarly culpable. At the very least, having faith, where that means believing despite a lack of evidence or despite contrary evidence is highly suspect. Having faith is the questionable practice, not failing to have it.

4. Atheism is bleak, nihilistic, amoral, dehumanizing, or depressing.

These accusations have been dealt with countless times. But let’s suppose that they are correct. Would they be reasons to reject the truth of atheism? They might be unpleasant affects, but having negative emotions about a claim doesn’t provide us with any evidence that it is false. Imagine upon hearing news about the Americans dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki someone steadfastly refused to believe it because it was bleak, nihilistic, amoral, dehumanizing, or depressing. Suppose we refused to believe that there is an AIDS epidemic that is killing hundreds of thousands of people in Africa on the same grounds.

5.Atheism is bad for you.Some studies in recent years have suggested that people who regularly attend church, pray, and participate in religious activities are happier, live longer, have better health, and less depression.

First, these results and the methodologies that produced them have been thoroughly criticized by experts in the field.Second, it would be foolish to conclude that even if these claims about quality of life were true, that somehow shows that there is theism is correct and atheism is mistaken.What would follow, perhaps, is that participating in social events like those in religious practices are good for you, nothing more.There are a number of obvious natural explanations.Third, it is difficult to know the direction of the causal arrow in these cases.Does being religious result in these positive effects, or are people who are happier, healthier, and not depressed more inclined to participate in religions for some other reasons?Fourth, in a number of studies atheistic societies like those in northern Europe scored higher on a wide range of society health measures than religious societies.

Given that atheists make up a tiny proportion of the world’s population, and that religious governments and ideals have held sway globally for thousands of years, believers will certainly lose in a contest over “who has done more harm,” or “which ideology has caused more human suffering.”It has not been atheism because atheists have been widely persecuted, tortured, and killed for centuries nearly to the point of extinction.

Sam Harris has argued that the problem with these regimes has been that they became too much like religions.“Such regimes are dogmatic to the core and generally give rise to personality cults that are indistinguishable from cults of religious hero worship. Auschwitz, the gulag, and the killing fields were not examples of what happens when human beings reject religious dogma; they are examples of political, racial and nationalistic dogma run amok. There is no society in human history that ever suffered because its people became too reasonable.”

7.Atheists are harsh, intolerant, and hateful of religion.

Sam Harris has advocated something he calls “conversational intolerance.”For too long, a confusion about religious tolerance has led people to look the other way and say nothing while people with dangerous religious agendas have undermined science, the public good, and the progress of the human race.There is no doubt that people are entitled to read what they choose, write and speak freely, and pursue the religions of their choice.But that entitlement does not guarantee that the rest of us must remain silent or not verbally criticize or object to their ideas and their practices, especially when they affect all of us.Religious beliefs have a direct affect on who a person votes for, what wars they fight, who they elect to the school board, what laws they pass, who they drop bombs on, what research they fund (and don’t), which social programs they fund (and don’t), and a long list of other vital, public matters.Atheists are under no obligation to remain silent about those beliefs and practices that urgently need to be brought into the light and reasonably evaluated.

Real respect for humanity will not be found by indulging your neighbor’s foolishness, or overlooking dangerous mistakes.Real respect is found in disagreement.The most important thing we can do for each other is disagree vigorously and thoughtfully so that we can all get closer to the truth.

8.Science is as much a religious ideology as religion is.

At their cores, religions and science have a profound difference.The essence of religion is sustaining belief in the face of doubts, obeying authority, and conforming to a fixed set of doctrines.By contrast, the most important discovery that humans have ever made is the scientific method.The essence of that method is diametrically opposed to religious ideals:actively seek out disconfirming evidence.The cardinal virtues of the scientific approach are to doubt, analyze, critique, be skeptical, and always be prepared to draw a different conclusion if the evidence demands it.